When
recently-deceased Irene Dunphy decided to “follow the light,” she thought she’d
end up in Heaven or Hell and her journey would be over.

Boy, was she
wrong.

She soon finds
that “the other side” isn’t a final destination but a kind of purgatory where
billions of spirits are stuck, with no way to move forward or back. Even worse,
deranged phantoms known as “Hungry Ghosts” stalk the dead, intent on destroying
them. The only way out is for Irene to forget her life on earth—including the
boy who risked everything to help her cross over—which she’s not about to do.

As Irene
desperately searches for an alternative, help unexpectedly comes in the
unlikeliest of forms: a twelfth-century Spanish knight and a nineteenth-century
American cowboy. Even more surprising, one offers a chance for redemption; the
other, love. Unfortunately, she won’t be able to have either if she can’t find
a way to escape the hellish limbo where they’re all trapped.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

&

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I am THRILLED
beyond all measure to finally be able to bring you Thereafter, and I want to
thank all the fans who have waited (more or less patiently) an extra year for
this book to finally come out. Thereafter would not have been possible without
your support—thank you all! I hope you love this beautiful new cover as much as
I do, and I hope you find Thereafter to be worth the wait.

Terri Bruce has
been making up adventure stories for as long as she can remember. Like Anne
Shirley, she prefers to make people cry rather than laugh, but is happy if she
can do either. She produces fantasy and adventure stories from a haunted house
in New England where she lives with her husband and three cats.

Her
hand touched a rock, one of the flat beach stones she’d seen on graves. She
picked it up, laying it flat in her palm. She didn’t remember picking this up.
In fact, she had been careful not to take any. It had seemed disrespectful and
too much like stealing to remove them, and while she’d seen a few here—both
loose and piled in cairns—she hadn’t picked any of them up. There had been no
point. What would she do with a rock?

No
wonder her bag was so heavy.

She
tossed the rock over her shoulder and heard it hit the ground with a satisfying
thud some distance away. It felt good to be rid of something, to make a
decision and be sure it was the right one.

She
surveyed the pile again and then grabbed a small handful of paper animals. She
picked one up between a finger and thumb. It was a horse. Irene had been in
Chinatown during Chinese Ghost Festival, a holiday in which the living left
offerings for the dead. These offerings included paper replicas of things
people thought the dead would need in the afterlife—money, clothes, television
sets, and even animals. Irene had admired the precise and delicate folds of the
Origami figures and had picked some up to admire them more closely. Without
thinking, she had dropped them into her bag and apparently been carrying them
ever since.

Well,
even Jonah couldn’t argue with her on this—there was no way she was going to
need a paper horse on her journey through the afterlife. Plus, these didn’t
hold any sentimental value. She cast the horse onto a nearby fire and watched
as the paper curled and blackened in the low-burning flames.

The
fire leapt and seemed to glow blue for a moment. Irene tensed—what was
happening?

Thick
black smoke began to rise slowly from the flames, spiraling upward in a
thickening column. The smoke grew denser and then elongated sideways. Irene
leapt to her feet and backed away, her heart pounding. Something was forming in
the fire.

The
smoke was taking shape now; there was purpose and design in its movements. She
could see a long, horizontal back, four legs, a neck, and finally a head and a
tail. The smoke swirled with a final flourish and then shuddered into the
solidity of a smoke-colored horse. The animal blinked passively. Then it
violently shook its head, blew out a breath, and delicately picked its way
forward out of the fire. It immediately put its head down and began to lip the
ground, looking for food.

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Hi, My name is Sandra, though for my blog I go by an adaptation of my middle name, Jeanz! I live in the UK, started blogging in Aug 2011. I have always loved books!. If a blurb catches my eye I will usually give reading it a go!

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